Tuesday, December 20, 2016

When Jack Mendelsohn reused old scripts as a writer for Tippy Teen and
her friends Go-Go and Animal at
Tower, he reused his own from Quality in the
Fifties—not only for Candy but for the shorter-lived Jonesy.

Go-Go and Animal 3 seems a good place to stop, as so far I haven't seen any such reruns in #4.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

For about half a year there was a Camelot-like moment in 1953 in which
writers as well as artist were routinely credited at a comic book
company. Trojan gave the credits on the inside-front-page tables of
contents on their anthology magazines.

The main four writers were Paul S. Newman, Jack Miller, Martin Smith,
and Richard Kahn. A while ago SangorShop asked me if I could
extrapolate Smith's stories for other companies from these. So far I
haven't, but serendipity led me to find some of Richard Kahn's
work at a company where he hadn't been known to
write—Timely/Atlas/Marvel-to-come.

Noticeable connections among these Kent Blake spy stories at Atlas
ishown in this tier from #4 are "A few minutes later!" and the drawn-out
"Argghhh"; I'd made a list of characteritics for "Writer KB" and found
it matching the new one I was making up for Kahn.

The writing for the next batch of Kent Blake stories seemed likely to
be by the same writer, but suddenly, as Blake goes back into uniform
and to Korea, the sound effect "Pi-toon" for cannon fire turns up
frequently, and I haven't seen in in Kahn's later war stories for
Trojan—so I'm still considering those Blake stories.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Here's a book based on a comic strip by Bob Kane before Batman. The Gottfredson-influenced "Peter Pupp" appeared in the early Jumbo Comics in the 1937-39, supplied by the Eisner-Iger Syndicate.

The children's book Adventures of Peter Pupp (Play Action Books) came out in 1944. The writer and artist were Iger staff members: writer Ruth Roche (whom most probably remember as the adapter of Frankenstein in Classic Comics) and artist David Icove.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Three Otto Binder pieces bear some resemblances. The later ones
certainly weren't rewrites, but when Binder sat down to write anew,
evidently he was inspired by his earlier work. The resemblance of the
first two is old news, but I just read the third and had to compare it
to the second to reassure myself that it is indeed a new novel.

In "Menace from the Future World" in All
Winners 21 (Winter,
1947), Future Man, who has mental powers, fights
the
All Winners Squad, who are led by Captain America. To clear 20th Century Earth
for his people of 1,000,000 A.D. Earth to inhabit, Future Man
intends to use
super-science weapons of extermination on five continents.

In The Avengers Battle the
Earth-Wrecker (1967), Karzz, an
alien from the future,
fights the Avengers, who are led by Captain America. He's hidden
world-wrecking super weapons in four corners of the globe, as he wants
to create an alternate time-line where 70th Century Earth
never stands in the way of his galactic conquests.

In The Mind from Outer Space
(1972),
the alien Jorzz, a free mind with mental powers,is after
segments of a super-science secret hidden 35,000 years earlier in four
corners of the globe, one that will enable him to conquer the
galaxy as he had planned to before he was disembodied back then. The
heroes from a scientific think tank fight him with technological
super-powers.

The heroes jokingly refer to Jorzz a number of times as "Mister Mind."

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Some
of Robert Bernstein's scripts for the costumed Western hero Black
Rider at Timely/Atlas are credited—artist Jay Scott Pike
added Bernstein's name when he signed his art. (Ernie Hart's Fifties
writing credits also come from Pike's adding the scripter's name.)
However, Pike didn't
credit
all of Bernstein's scripts on his stories, and there were other artists
who didn't go to that trouble.

Black Rider was suspended with #18, and when it returned almost two
years later there was a new writer, whose distinctive
gunshots—"Whram"—don't identify him but
show him as
the main writer of Kid Colt at the time too.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

In
the 1966 novel Batman
vs. 3 Villains of Doom the
Penguin, the Joker, and Catwoman vie
for the Academy Award of crime, a golden machine gun: the Tommy. DC
in the person of E. Nelson Bridwell considered the novel
canon, mentioning the Tommy in a World's
Finest letter column.

Although
William Woolfolk (as Winston Lyon) certainly followed the
Batman TV show in the details—Robin's
"Holy" exclamations, Chief O'Hara, the bust of
Shakespeare—the three villains' schemes are adapted from
comic
book stories. (And the Catwoman is wearing her comic-book costume, with
its full-head mask and green cape.)

Once I recognized the stories' sources from their synopses in the
Batman volume of Michael Fleisher's Encyclopedia
of Comic Book Heroes, I assumed
they must have been written by Woolfolk—having seen pages of
a few of his scripts in fanzines, I thought he might have kept them on
hand. Evidently not, at least in this case; once I saw the stories
themselves, I changed my opinion. Copies of these stories
must have been pulled from the files and sent along to him by DC.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

On my posts about Sal Trapani's ghost pencillers, I figured he knew most of them from their working together at Charlton. I suspected the same sort of thing applied with John Severin's finding a ghost for this story from Cracked 70 (Aug/68). "Snow Flake and the Seven Dwarfs" is signed only "Severin" in his handwriting, and only the regular Cracked artists are listed in the masthead. I wondered where he could have known this artist from, and figured it must have been when he was drawing at EC; this penciller was the colorist there.

All kidding aside, Marie Severin would have her pencils inked by her brother, with both credited for the first time, a couple of years later at Marvel on Kull the Conqueror. There may be more examples of this ghosting at Cracked, but an awful lot of its issues are hard to come by nowadays.

Friday, June 24, 2016

If at first you don't succeed in identifying an artist on a comic book, keep on looking at other comics, and maybe when you go back to that first one you'll have run across some clue and a light bulb will go on.

The Courtship of Eddie's Father (2 issues, Jan/70 and May/70), a TV tie-in from Dell, stumped me and others. The best I could come up with was that the artist wasn't Jack Sparling.

In the time since, I IDed the artist on a DC romance story by some girls' faces—

—comparing here from my July 9, 2015 post a page from "Two Hearts on a Tree" in Secret Hearts 121 (July/67) with a tier from Carl Pfeufer's known work on Super Green Beret 1 (June/67) at Milson.

Who was expecting Carl Pfeufer at Dell, 1970? He drew all the stories in the two issues of The Courtship of Eddie's Father; D. J. Arneson wrote them.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Pete Alvarado strayed over from animated-style comics (I associate him best with Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken among the many, many features he did) to pencil, and for all I know ink, the first issue of Dell's Ricky Nelson (Four Color 956, Dec/58) spinning off from the TV sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." Russ Manning drew the fourth issue, and in between--who knows?

The best way to recognize an artist's work when he may be trying to match the models in a tie-in is to look at secondary characters--note the soda jerk Sam here. Still, Alvarado's characteristic finger shapes and arm positioning do show up at times on Ricky, as in the first panel here. The silhouette in the final panel is also a giveaway.

Alvarado would do Dell's first three issues of The Three Stooges in a style closer to animation cartooning, even though Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe are as "real" as Ricky Nelson.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

After
the nom de plume "Norm DiPluhm" at Charlton was
attributed by
fans to Steve Skeates, he spent years explaining that it wasn't him.

Rip Jagger's recent post on his blog about DiPluhm's Phantom stories
reminded me of who the writer really is—the splash page to
"Skyjack"
that Rip uses as his illustration has the Ghost Who Walks saying "Great
Scot" with one "t" rather than the more common "Great Scott." That and
other markers unlike Skeates' identify the writer as D. J. Arneson.
(He also wrote as DiPluhm
for Go-Go
and Abbott and Costello,
two
titles Skeates worked on, which may help explain those
fans' thought processes). This example is from "The Giant Ape of Thawth."

Friday, April 29, 2016

The Who's Who credits Sam Citron with Girls' Love Stories 1968 at DC. It gives him stories at Gold Key around the same time in Ripley's Believe It or Not and The Twilight Zone. On the Grand Comics Database the latter stories, uncredited in the comics themselves, have been identified. But possibly the art spotters who paid attention to the weird anthologies at one company didn't cross over to the romance ones at another.

That art of Citron's for Girls' Love Stories is on "Don't Leave Me Again" in number 138 (Oct/68). As with the Gold Key stories, he's inking himself here; at ACG three or four years earlier, all his stories (credited in the comics, as per usual at that company), were inked by Pete Costanza or Tom Hickey. This story's splash page has been correctly noted in the GCD as a reprint of the Infantino & Giordano cover.

I spent some time looking though the Sixties DC romance books to see if Citron had any work obscured by inkers, but finally had to admit to myself that the handful I found were by perhaps Werner Roth or Tony Abruzzo. DC did try to homogenize art into a house style at times via the inking.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

A
feature of Charlton's Lawbreakers
Suspense Stories and its
retitling, Strange Suspense
Stories, for
awhile was the contest where readers provided a solution to an
unfinished story; that synopsis
would be scripted and illustrated in a later issue. The odd thing
is that Carl Memling scripted five of the solutions but only one of the
unfinished story/solution pairs.

"What Was in Sam Dora's Box?" (art by Steve Ditko) recycles a gimmick from an EC story but
the pun in the character's name is what's of interest here; compare
with the (better) pun for
Memling's story "Appointment with Sam Mara" in Dell's Ghost
Stories 4 Oct-Dec/63).

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

How much Jim Steranko contributed to the published stories of the
characters he created for the Harvey Thrillers begs two
questions: how many scripts did he submit and how many were
used? Steranko's scripts on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, are much more
in the Marvel style than anything at Harvey, so although there isn't a
lot that lets me say "The Birth of a Hero" is written by Steranko,
there's nothing that leads to any other writer.

Look through France Edward Herron's credited work at DC on Blackhawk
and Challengers and you'll find "Kwhamma" a lot.

Otto Binder's attributions for the back-up pieces in the Thrillers line
seem to have morphed into credits for the main features, but I can't
find him on Spyman, for one. I can't even find his style on the Eye Spy
backup in #1.

Nick Caputo gives Mike Esposito as a possibility for the inks for the
first part of Tuska's story. A CGD guess at the second part's inks is
Carl Pfeufer.

I suspect the intro pages on the Thrillers are more likely written by
editor Joe Simon than by the main-feature writers.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Stanley
and His Monster
was only one issue old (having displaced The
Fox and the Crow in their own title after a couple of years as a
front-of the-book "back-up" feature) when the
editorship and the format changed. Issue 109, the last under Murray
Boltinoff, contained a full-length story with credits for Arnold Drake
(the feature's sole writer
since the first episode in Fox
and the Crow 95),
Bob Oksner, and Tex
Blaisdell. As of 110, under Joe Orlando
there were no writers' credits, and signatures for the
story artists only in 111. The format became three
stories per issue.

Orlando kept Oksner and Blaisdell for some stories, but did not use
Drake. He went to Howie Post for scripts. The credits pasted onto '80s
reprints for Drake are very likely sheer guesswork rather than from the
records.

The inker on the Sekowsky story could be Tex Blaisdell, but Stanley's
face throughout looks to be by a different hand. Why is there a comma
in the title? Ask the Rolling Stones.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

George Roussos is credited in the Grand Comics Database with anonymously inking the Dr. Strange story "The Return of the Omnipotent Baron Mordo" in Strange Tales 114 (Nov/63). The comment suggests that he may have been brought on board because Stan Lee wanted to rush the story into that issue (Dr. Strange stories appeared in 110 and 111 but not in 112 and 113).

Actually Steve Ditko had plenty of time to ink the story. And then Stan had the time to have Roussos do artwork corrections.

Roussos inked Victoria Bentley. I might have said he redrew her, but I see Ditko's poses still there. Dr. Strange himself, Mordo, and so on, are pretty much Steve Ditko's work, pencils and inks. Roussos may have contributed a bit more—on this page, the tree in panel 3 and Mordo's hands in panel 6 look like his brushstrokes—but to my eye the men's faces are more finely inked than Victoria's.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Sal Trapani had a signed story in each issue
of Dell's Flying Saucers
(#5 reprinted #1). Who ghosted the pencils for him? I'd say two
artists we're familiar with.

I believe I see the generic Charlton style of Bill Molno under three
stories; the tier from "Swamp Gas" uses the man-at-the-steering-wheel
shot I compared in stories signed by Molno and those Molno ghosted for Joe
Shuster.

In the fourth Trapani-signed story the penciling style changes and
reminds me of the scratchy effect in mid-seventies Charlton work by
Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico. The clouds from the flying saucer in
"Space Spiders?" show it most obviously.

There are two FS
stories which Trapani left unsigned because he had nothing to do with
them, but the general Charlton feel seems to have connected him with
them. They're both pencilled by Dick Giordano. I can't say who inked
them; not only do I not see Trapani work, I can't say I see Giordano himself
or Frank McLaughlin on the inks
either.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Just
as Stan Lee reused only his own scripts when he refried Millie
the Model stories,
when Jack Mendelsohn reused old scripts as a writer for Tippy Teen at
Tower, he reused only his own—his
own Candy stories from Quality in the
Fifties. They are indeed rewrites, some more, some less; the gag
climaxing "Chemical Warfare" is different from the one ending
"Chemical Formula."

The Tippy character Ashley Hartburn (think Reggie Mantle) comes
directly from Candy's cast with no name change.

The first story in Tippy
1,
"Great Skate," is by Mendelsohn, as I've
mentioned,
but I don't see an earlier version of it.
There are a lot more Quality/Tower refries, but since I have a
gap in Tippi
issues on hand
after 3, I'll stop here for now.

Friday, January 15, 2016

During Dick Dillin's long run across two companies in the Fifties and Sixties on Blackhawk, he had to be spelled only a couple of times. In Blackhawk 210 (July/65) under the usual inker Chuck Cuidera's work (note the close-up in Panel 1), Jim Mooney steps in to pencil, as indexers were quick to notice (see notably the young women in Panel 3, although the men's poses are evidence of Mooney's work too).

However...

Mooney didn't pencil all of "Danger--Blackhawk Bait." He did Part 2. Part 1 was pencilled by Dick Dillin:

The main Blackhawk writers at this point are Ed Herron and Bob Haney; "Aaaah" and, elsewhere in the story, "Uuuuh", drawn out on the "a" or "u" rather than the "h", pinpoint this script as Haney's.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

In
rereading mid-sixties Marvels, occasionally you might look over the
list of Merry Marvel Marching Society members in each issue to see if there are any names
you recognize with hindsight. For instance, I see Will Meugniot in
Strange Tales
143. And then I see a professional writer listed in Strange Tales 148—under his fandom pseudonym (he used his real name on his books).

Ted Johnstone,
at the top of the rightmost column, is
actually Man from U.N.C.L.E.
tie-in writer David McDaniel. So it's appropriate that his listing
appears in the book featuring Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
When ST
148 (Sept/66) went to press McDaniel's first novel, The
Dagger
Affair, had been on the stands
for about half a year and his second, The
Vampire Affair, was just coming
out from Ace Books. It was in his novels, not on the TV show,
that the secret history of THRUSH was revealed and in fact its full
name: the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and
the Subjugation of Humanity.

(I didn't have to look that up any more than I would the
United Network Command for Law and Enforcement,
The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves, or Supreme
Headquarters, International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division, but I
can't get any further on SHIELD's gritty, with-it, "up-to-date" new
name [twenty years now?] than Strategic Homeland blah blah
blah blah.)

In the U.N.C.L.E. novel that McDaniel wrote to end the series but that
Ace
declined to publish in 1971, The
Final Affair, one character, a
motorcycle gang member, is nicknamed The Thing and shouts "It's
clobberin' time!" And at one point Mr. Waverly refers to THRUSH as
"that Hydra-headed bird."